The real life_social_network

1.
THE REAL LIFE
SOCIAL NETWORK
Hi everyone, thanks for coming.

2.
@padday
So my name is Paul Adams and I work in the UX team at Google. Iʼm the user research lead
for social, and work on things like Buzz and YouTube. I spend a lot of my time doing
research with people on how they use social media. I sit down with people, and have them
map out their social network for me, and we look at how they use tools like email, Facebook,
Twitter, their phone, and so on. One of the things we talk about is the differences between
their social network online, and their social network ofﬂine. Today, Iʼm going to talk about
some of the things weʼve learned over the past few years, what it means for the future of the
web, and some tips for design.
Before I get down into some detail about social networks, I want to start by telling you a story
from our research.

3.
Debbie
I want to start by telling you a story about Debbie, a girl we did research with. Debbie has
lots of different groups in her life.

11.
Now, the 10 year old kids she teaches are also on Facebook, and they have “friended”
Debbie.

12.
When we were doing research with Debbie, we were asking her about her usage of
Facebook and she was showing us the things she does.

13.
Debbie commented on Brianʼs photo.
In the middle of the session, she realized, for the ﬁrst time, that the ten year old kids could
see the photos from the gay bar.
Not surprisingly, Debbie was very upset. She was upset at herself for not realizing, and at the
system for letting it happen.

14.
Facebook itself is not the problem here. The problem here is that these are different parts of
Debbieʼs life that would never have been exposed to each other ofﬂine were linked online.

15.
ONLINE OFFLINE
The problem is that the social networks weʼre creating online donʼt match the social networks
we already have ofﬂine. This creates many problems, and a few opportunities.

16.
SOCIAL WEB
CONNECTED
RELATIONSHIPS
INFLUENCE
IDENTITY
PRIVACY
Iʼm going to talk about 6 things today. Iʼm going to start by talking about how the web is
fundamentally changing.
The real life social network. How people are connected to each other ofﬂine, and what that
means for their behaviour online.
Relationships. We all have very different relationships with the people in our life and
designing for them is very different.
Inﬂuence. How people inﬂuence each other, and how that is driven by the structure of our
social network.
Identity. Why identity is a cornerstone of the social web.
And last not absolutely not least - Privacy. Why itʼs critical to give people control over their
data.

17.
THE SOCIAL
WEB IS NOT
GOING AWAY
The social web is not a fad, and itʼs not going away. Itʼs not an add-on to the web as we
know it today.
Itʼs a fundamental change, a re-architecture, and in hindsight its evolution is obvious.

18.
The web is
undergoing a
fundamental
change
Make no mistake about this.
Everyone in this room will need to learn how to design social features on websites.
Whether you like it or not.

19.
1 2 3
The web was originally built to link static documents together (left), but evolved to
incorporate social media (center), and weʼre now seeing a web built around people, where
their proﬁles and content are moving with them as they visit different websites (right).

20.
The toolbar along the top of the New York Times site is an early example of where the web is
headed. Sites we visit will have our identity and social network with us, showing us the
activity on that site from people in our network.

21.
So youʼre going to appear as your Facebook identity on this Government website. Your
proﬁle follows you, and your network of connections follows you.

22.
Hereʼs another example from Yelp. My identity and friends from Facebook are here on Yelp.

23.
When we use search engines today, itʼs a pretty solitary experience. We get millions of web
pages in our results, yet we donʼt see any other people. But notice how often we send other
people links to what we found, search in the company of others, and talk about our search
results when we meet.

24.
Tweet
Review
And now something is happening. Weʼre starting to see social interactions appear in search.

25.
Buy this? No.
People are increasingly using the web to get the information they need from each other,
rather than from businesses.

26.
?
People are increasingly likely to ﬁnd out about products and brands from their friends rather
than from your business. It means that it is much harder to control how people ﬁrst come to
experience your messages.

27.
You should come to our
restaurant, itʼs delicious!
This restaurant is average,
service was slow.
This restaurant is average,
service was slow.
Paul has been here three times
in the last two weeks.

28.
You should come to our
Business
restaurant, itʼs delicious!
This restaurant is average, Stranger
service was slow.
This restaurant is average,
Friend
service was slow.
Paul has been here three times Friend
in the last two weeks. of friend
This isnʼt just true for restaurants. Itʼs true for every business. Yelp might have chosen to
integrate with Facebook, and you may choose not to, but when integration is controlled in the
browser, this is out of your control.

29.
We're also seeing a much bigger shift in how people spend their time online.
People are spending much more time interacting with other people, and much less time
consuming content from websites. This shift is not about any one particular social network.
It's about people connecting to each other online.

30.
So this shift is much greater than any one social network, and much more complicated than
deciding where the 'share this' buttons go. Almost all the sites and apps we design from now
on will have embedded social features.

31.
Itʼs already happening. In the future weʼll know things like who out of our friends has bought
this bag, who has bought this brand, who bought competitor brands, what do people think of
this brand and weʼll have ways to communicate with them to ﬁnd out more. Understanding
sociability will become a core requirement for designing online. Almost all of us will need to
become skilled in social web design.

32.
Controlled
Open
The social web, and all social media that operate within it, is a way of thinking as opposed to
a new channel. Itʼs not about sales, or ads, or click-through rates. Itʼs about pursuing
relationships and fostering communities of consumers. Itʼs about rethinking how you make
plans when your customers are in the center and in control.

34.
When thinking about how the web is changing, many people focus on the technology. How
many people have heard of Foursquare?
People are using technologies every day that didnʼt exist a few years ago. The rapid pace of
change means that businesses
focus on what technology or application is coming next. But the people using it donʼt care
about the technology; they care about the communication that the technology enables.

35.
New technology doesnʼt change how our brains work. Social networks are not new. For
thousands of years, people have formed into groups, built strong and weak relationships with
others, formed allegiances, and spread rumor and gossip.
The emergence of the social web is simply our online world catching up with our ofﬂine
world. As technology changes the tools we use to communicate, we still use the same
behavior patterns that we evolved over those thousands of years.

36.
No explicit goals
Focus on motivation
There are two problems with focusing on technology.

37.
174,340 fans
Now what?
The ﬁrst is that people often don't know what they are going to do with the things they build.
There are so many Facebook fan pages with hundreds of thousands of followers yet nothing
is happening. So 100,000 people became a fan of yours on Facebook. Now what? This is
the fan page for the magazine seventeen. There are 174,000 fans but no conversation. You
need to look at things like Facebook fan pages and think: “How is this going to fundamentally
improve my relationship with my customers?”

38.
What are you doing?
I’m social networking!
The second problem is more subtle, and it's complicated and messy so people tend to ignore
it.
When have you ever heard this? People donʼt say things like this when they are on social
networks.

39.
What are you doing?
ekend!
I’m checking out the photos from last we
I’m social networking!
They say things like “Iʼm checking out what Dave did last night, or Iʼm checking out the
photos from last weekend, or Iʼm checking out what my friends in London have been up to.”
The problems weʼre dealing with are social science problems, not technology problems. The
technology may be changing fast but the underlying human motivations are changing very
slowly, and in many places not at all. We need to ﬁrst understand what is motivating people
to use these services. Not jump on the latest social networking bandwagon.

40.
Social networking is a
means to an end.
You need to understand
what the end is.
Focus on what motivates people to use new technology. Technologies will come and go, but
the fundamental social behavior patterns of people will remain the same. A better long term
strategy for business is to understand peopleʼs motivations for using new technologies, and
not the technologies themselves.

41.
Understanding
sociability is
complex
Understanding the end is not simple. In fact, it's very complex. I'm going to try and map out
some key behaviors that matter.
If you come away from this talk thinking that designing for the social web is complicated,
that's a good thing. It is! We don't have to understand it all today, we just need to start with a
solid foundation from which to build.

43.
Social
networks are
not new.
The most important thing to know about social networks is that they are not new.

44.
OMG!
http://lucasgalo.ﬁles.wordpress.com/2009/01/h-and-g-lg.jpg
They have existed for almost as long as we have. As we saw with Debbie, our online social
networks are simply a crude representation of our ofﬂine social networks. We have a long
way to go before getting anywhere close to the complexity of real life. As designers, this is a
great opportunity. Let's start by looking at how we represent our relationships online.

45.
People donʼt
have one group
of friends.
Friends. When we sign up, most social networks ask us to create our "friends" group.

47.
Making people create one big friends group has many of the same problems as planning
seating arrangements at your wedding. This is my seating arrangement at my wedding.
Suddenly all these people from different parts of your life will be in the same room together.
Anyone who is married and went through this will remember how stressful it is.

57.
Over the past three years, we've done an exercise with many of the people we bring in for
research. We ask them to map out their social network, to put people on post-it notes and
arrange them in whatever way makes sense.

58.
How re al world
al netwo rks work
soci
Weʼve learned a lot about how real world social networks work

62.
So 4-6 groups of less than 10 people that form around life stages.
One interesting thing about these groups is that they are very independent. When people
map out their social network, we often hear stories about how they tried to mix the groups,

63.
http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/sp00/3536211311/
For example, it was their birthday, they had a party

64.
College
Friends
http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/sp00/3536211311/
Their college friends came

65.
New York
friend
http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/sp00/3536211311/
And their New York friends came. Heʼs looking a bit awkward back there.
These stories never end well!

68.
I’m going out clubbing
tonight! Yeeaaah!!!! :-)
In research, we often ask people about the updates they post. We probe them about their
motivation for posting them, and whether they are aimed at anyone in particular.

69.
It turns out that often, people have an intended audience, and it's usually a small subset of
their contacts.

71.
I posted about my meal while on
vacation in New York. My intention
was to share with the people who I
had spoken with about the meal...but it
is hard to share it with specific
people on Facebook.
I'm sure we've all been in a situation where we're looking at something someone posts on
Facebook and are wondering why they would post something so odd. But it probably wasn't
for you. So next time you see this, consider that it may be directed at other people.

72.
The word
Friends is
unhelpful
Not only do we not have one group of friends, but the word "friends" itself, is actually pretty
unhelpful.

73.
Friends
George Bush and Tony Blair are friends. But that's not the same as my friend who I know
since I was ﬁve who now babysits my children.

81.
How are people
connected
around your
business?
Avoid the use of the word friend for connecting people. Understand how people describe
their relationships for the behavior you’re trying to encourage.
Allow people to create custom names for groups, and allow people to rename the group if it
changes over time.
Support side conversations. Allow people to fork conversation threads with a smaller
number of people.

86.
We trust some people in a group on one set of topics, and others on a different set. We trust
on of our friends more on good places to eat, another on good places to go on vacation.
Think of some of the people in your life. Maybe some close friends. Think of some people
you've known a long time.

87.
This might all sound obvious, but it has profound effects on our social behavior, online and
ofﬂine. And we often donʼt consider these effects when we're designing.
All our “friends” are treated equally on social networks, and all our contacts appear
alphabetically and equal in our mobile phones.

88.
Designing for
different types
of relationships
Let's think a bit more about different types of relationships.

89.
Here's an example. Think about Instant Messaging. People's chat roster contains people
they are close to, and people they are not so close to. They are all there, one big group. IM
lists are not designing to support different types of relationships.

90.
Wife
Not sure
Friend
This is my wife, this is a friend of a friend, and this is someone Iʼm not sure I know. So people
have this list, and they are worried that someone they don't want to talk to might see that
they are online and say hello.

91.
So they turn themselves invisible. Everyone in their list sees them as ofﬂine. This is broken.
This is a broken user experience. It's broken because the people they care about, people
that they would welcome a chat with, also see that they are 'ofﬂine'.

92.
I think really carefully
before posting my status.
This problem isnʼt just limited to IM, we see it on social networks too, people self-censor all
the time.

94.
We actually have a framework for thinking about, and designing for, our different
relationships. For decades, people have spoken about strong and weak ties. There is an
abundance of research on strong and weak ties.

96.
Strong ties are the people you care about most. Your best friends. Your family. People often
refer to strong ties as their “circle of trust.” We rely on strong ties for emotional support
throughout life. Research has shown that maintaining our strong ties is important for our well-
being. People with strong friendship bonds have lower incidents of heart disease, and get
fewer colds and cases of the ﬂu.

102.
Average of 130
Facebook friends
Only interact regularly
with 4 to 6
Many research studies have shown that the vast majority of usage on social networks is with
small numbers of strong ties. The average number of friends on Facebook is 130, and many
users have many more. Yet despite having hundreds of friends, most people on Facebook
only interact regularly with 4 to 6 people.

103.
In another study, researchers analyzed all the photographs posted on Facebook pages in
one college. When they looked at how many friends people had (based on who was in their
photos), the average was 6.6

104.
80%
Strong ties also dominate phone usage. 80% of phone calls are made to the same 4 people.

106.
A study in the 1970s showed that the majority of phone calls were to people who live within
ﬁve miles of the caller's home.

107.
http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/molemaster/3491059121/
And studies in online gaming show that gamers are most often playing with strong ties who
they already know.

108.
Buy this OK
Strong ties often wield the most inﬂuence over peopleʼs decisions. For example, they are
often the biggest factor in purchase decisions. Think about the last time you consulted a
friend on whether to buy something. Chances are, it was quite recently.

109.
Design for
So much of our lives revolve around our strong ties, and we need to think about designing for
them as distinct from other types of relationships.

110.
Let's look at weak ties. Weak ties are people you know, but don't care much about. Your
friends' friends. Some people you met recently. Typically, we communicate with weak ties
infrequently.

111.
Our brains can
only keep up with
a limited number
of weak tie
relationships.
Our brains can only handle a limited number of weak tie relationships

112.
150
Most of us can only stay up-to-date with up to 150 weak ties. This is a limitation of our brain.
This number has been consistent throughout history.

113.
http://lucasgalo.ﬁles.wordpress.com/2009/01/h-and-g-lg.jpg
Neolithic farming villages tended to separate into two once they reached 150 inhabitants.

114.
The Roman army was split into groups of 150 so that everyone in the group knew each
other.

115.
It is still true today, online as well as ofﬂine. There is evidence that when online games
involving social interaction reach about 150 active users, group cohesion collapses, resulting
in dissatisfaction and defection.

118.
We may know many more, but we canʼt stay up-to-date with what is happening in their life.
Think about your connections on your social network. For how many of them could you
describe something that happened in their life in the last few days? What about the last
week? The last month? How many would you join, uninvited, at a chance meeting in a bar?
Itʼs unlikely to be more than 150. Social networks donʼt necessarily create more connections,
they just make our existing connections more visible.

119.
Online social
networks make it
easier to
reconnect and
catch up with
weak ties

120.
Social networks have changed some aspects of our weak tie relationships. We now have an
easy route to connect to them that didn't previously exist. In the past we would have to meet
or phone them to catch up

121.
but we can now look at what theyʼve been up to via their online social network proﬁle. This
lets us easily communicate with them - it gives us a lightweight route to get back in touch.
This is a powerful route when we're sourcing new information.

122.
But strong and weak ties are not enough when we think of relationships online. We need a
new category of tie, and I call it the temporary tie. Temporary ties are people that you have
no recognized relationship with, but that you temporarily interact with.

130.
Once the task has been completed, temporary ties are unlikely to interact again. You don't
know these people beyond the one conversation you had, or the words they typed and
whatever online proﬁle they have. Your interaction with them is temporary. With the rise of
user generated content online, temporary ties are becoming more important.

131.
Trust
As designers, the biggest thing we need to think about when designing for temporary tie
interactions is trust.

132.
How can we design in things that help people understand whether they should trust each
other? Here is a nice example from evogear.com. I can start to trust this review because I
know that the person actually bought the skis he's reviewing.

133.
Different
relationships
So let's go back to our diagram. We have different groups. They are independent.
But now, we can also see that we have different types of relationships.
This is the eco-system around which we need to design. But you'll probably never need to
design for them all at once. It's more likely that you'll be designing for one type of tie.

134.
What type of
tie are you
designing for?
Knowing which tie you're designing for can really help you prioritize features.
Consider how to design for different types of relationships. Something designed for close
friends to interact will look a lot different than something designed for friends of friends to
interact, which will look different than something for strangers to interact.
Don’t try to design something for all types of relationships. You’ll simply end up with a
compromised solution for everyone. Understand which types of relationship ties are most
important for what you’re creating, and design primarily for them.

136.
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People have different audiences for communication. They may need to communicate with
one person, a few people, or many people. There are also times when a few people need to
communicate with each other, or when a few people need to communicate with many
people.

137.
The other person and their relationship
The content being communicated
The urgency of reply required
The level of privacy required
Businesses need to consider all these factors when choosing the best communication
features for their consumers (for example, whether they should build a forum or support
instant messaging for customer service).

139.
7 to 15 people
People interact with very few of the connections in their network. Because attention is a
scarce resource online, people interact with the people closest to them, and the people who
reciprocate their attention. The majority of communication instances happen with a small
number of strong ties. Although weak ties are much bigger in number, communication with
them is very infrequent. Research shows that on average, people have ongoing
communication with between seven and 15 people, but most communication is concentrated
around a personʼs ﬁve strongest ties.

140.
Many people use email for very private exchanges. For example, sharing photos or sensitive
articles that they would prefer not to post on a social network. Some young adults use email
to communicate with their strongest ties because their social network is overloaded with
information from lots of different people, and their message might not be noticed.

141.
Just home from work OMG
what a day!
Status updates are often perceived as a narcissistic activity. But research has indicated that
they support important social functions. People have four primary reasons for updating their
status:
- People update their status to shape how others perceive them.
- People update their status to maintain and grow relationships.
- People update their status to share content that others might ﬁnd valuable.
- People update their status to source information.

142.
Which
communication
channel does
your audience
need?
People’s online communication channels need to support the right types of interaction and
audience. Ensure you know what your users need. A feature that is designed to support
one-to-one communication will look different than one designed to support one-to-many
communication.
Different channels have different attributes that make them more or less appropriate for
communication with different audiences. Understanding these attributes, and when and
why people use different channels, can help companies give people the right
communication options at the right times.

143.
HOW PEOPLE
INFLUENCE
EACH OTHER
Understanding how people inﬂuence each other is not simple.

144.
We rarely make decisions alone. In the 1960s, Tupperware built a million dollar business on
the fact that we rarely make decisions alone. Before Tupperware, many products were sold
by the door to door salesman. Tupperware changed this. They sold to people in groups. If
your friend and neighbor is buying Tupperware, it must be good.

146.
People try to behave rationally, they try to make objective decisions, but other factors mean
that they can't. The problem is that we all have limited access to information, and limited
memory. Because of this, we have learned to rely on others to help us make decisions. We
assume that other people know things we don't. In fact, we do this so often, that we
automatically look to the actions of others, even when the answer is obvious.

148.
Information Memory
The web is increasing the volume of information available to us, but our capacity for memory
isn't changing. So it's likely that we'll increasingly turn to others to make decisions. There
was once a time when we picked what restaurant to eat in by looking in the window. But now,
we often can't decide without pulling out our phones and searching the web for reviews from
people who have eaten there before.

149.
My decisions are being made over here.
If other people are heavily inﬂuencing our decisions, and in some cases making the
decisions for us, how does this impact what we buy, what sites we visit, how we spend our
time? If we want people to use our products, to use our website, it is important that we
design in features that support our friends making decisions for us. We see it in some simple
forms already, like here where you can email a friend for advice. But we can layer on

150.
We see it in some simple forms already, like here where you can email a friend for advice

151.
The role of
inﬂuentials is
over estimated
How people inﬂuence each other is complex, and the role of "inﬂuentials" in society is over-
estimated

152.
Understanding how people inﬂuence each other is not simple. It's certainly not as simple as
many people believe - that there are a small number of very inﬂuential people in society, and
if you reach and inﬂuence them, they will inﬂuence hundreds, thousands and even millions of
others. Many research studies have shown that other factors play a much bigger part in how
people are inﬂuenced.

156.
Whether
someone can be
inﬂuenced is as
important as the
strength of the
inﬂuencer.

157.
Inﬂuential?
Inﬂuenceable?
There may be some individuals who have great inﬂuence, but it is without doubt that how
people inﬂuence each other has many other factors. A key insight is that when we study how
people inﬂuence each other, it's important to focus on the person being inﬂuenced as well as
the person doing the inﬂuencing.

158.
What their social network looks like
What they have experienced before
There are two primary factors in understanding whether someone can be inﬂuenced:
- What their social network looks like
- What they have experienced before
Iʼm only going to focus on the top one today.

159.
What their social network looks like includes:
- How big the network is
- Who is connected to who in the network
- What messages ﬂow through it and across it
- How long the messages last in the network

160.
Hereʼs a simple example. Letʼs imagine an “inﬂuencer” was telling me to buy Adidas. But two
of my other friends are telling me to buy Puma. The more people that give us an opinion, the
less inﬂuenced we are by any one of those opinions. So you may think you're targeting the
most inﬂuential person in a group or community, but if multiple other people in that group or
community think your product is bad, your efforts in reaching the "inﬂuentials" are wasted.

161.
What if everyone else is telling me how great Puma are? How inﬂuential is the Adidas
message going to be? Was it a good idea to seed the highly connected person? Or would it
have been better to seed widely and broadly across the network?

163.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/joanna8555/4041537710/
Studies into buying behavior and decision making have consistently found that we are
disproportionally inﬂuenced by the opinions and actions of the people around us. These can
be the people around us in a physical space. Studies have shown that students with studious
roommates become more studious themselves, and diners sitting next to heavy eaters tend
to eat more.

164.
However, it is more common for us to be inﬂuenced by the people we are closest to
emotionally - our family, our best friends, and sometimes some of our co-workers.

165.
Voting studies from the 1940s showed that when it came to deciding who to vote for, people
were less inﬂuenced by the media, and much more heavily inﬂuenced by members of their
family and close friends. This is also true with buying behavior today. This study might be
60-70 years old, but remember that these behaviors are hard wired into all of us.

167.
Our temporary ties inﬂuence us too. On the left, the New York Times shows the stories other
people have been emailing, blogging, and searching. This inﬂuences what we might consider
important to read next. On the right, Kayak.com shows the prices that other people paid for
the same ﬂight route over the past 90 days. This affects whether we consider the price we
are being offered as cheap or expensive, and inﬂuences our decision to purchase.
Researcher Duncan Watts found that when choosing new music, knowing what music other
people listened to was far more inﬂuential than whether the music was of high quality. He
found that the music people downloaded was the music that other people had downloaded
before them.

168.
A study about Amazon.com found that people tend to give items the same rating as people
before them have given. A high average rating means that people are unlikely to give
something a 1-star rating, even if that is what they had intended before they saw other
peopleʼs ratings.

169.
How are you
showing other
peopleʼs
opinions?
Consider how to display multiple opinions, and how different versions might change
people’s behavior. Showing many opinions may result in few of them being inﬂuential.
Show how people are connected, up to three degrees.
When showing other people, consider how the information shown may change the viewer’s
behavior. This also applies to showing people’s previous actions.

170.
HOW PEOPLE
DISPLAY
THEMSELVES
TO OTHERS
One huge part of the social web is how people represent themselves to others. How they
represent their identity.

173.
Online is happening through proﬁles.
Proﬁles are really important. They allow me to see that the person I'm looking at is the
person that I know ofﬂine. They allow me to ﬁgure out whether I should trust someone when
reading their review.

174.
I think really carefully
before posting my status.
One thing we see a lot in research is that people think carefully about what status updates
they post. They think about how it will reﬂect on them. Sometimes they share things because
they are proud, sometimes because they think something is cool. And people often self-
censor. They often decide not to post, because of what they may look like to others. People
care deeply about how they look to others. They care when they dress themselves in the
morning, and they care when they interact with other people during the day.

175.
People have
multiple facets of
identity
The most important thing to recognize about identity, is that people don't have one identity.
There is not one proﬁle that ﬁts for all the people in their life. People appear differently to
different audiences. They act one way with their family, they act another way in work, and
they act another way with their best friends.

176.
Again, the one big bucket of friends becomes problematic. This is because people only have
one proﬁle. Online, it is hard to set things up so that one group to see you one way, and
another group to see you a different way. This has to, and will, change. Let me show you two
examples.

178.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/fuddland/356325106/
Think about a teacher. She needs to appear one way to her students, another way to their
parents, and another way to her friends.

179.
Can we be
Facebook friends?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/fuddland/356325106/
What does she do when her students ask her why she won't friend them on Facebook?
This may seem funny, but itʼs very real.

181.
Sometimes
people need to be
anonymous
Half of the top 1000 reviewers on Amazon donʼt use their real name.

182.
Ratings that are
linked to peopleʼs
real names are
20% higher than
those that arenʼt.
People are worried about reciprocation: will that person now go and give me a bad review?
They are also worried about repercussions: will the restaurant owner give me a hard time if I
return?

183.
Managing identity
has high
overhead
Managing our identity ofﬂine is relatively easy as the different groups in our life rarely overlap
in time and space. We see our families at home and act one way; we go to work and act
another way; and we meet our college friends in a bar an act a third way.
Managing identity online is much harder, as groups can easily overlap. People have
workarounds to manage this, including multiple email accounts, multiple Facebook accounts,
and by using certain tools with speciﬁc audiences

184.
After 24 hours: 18%
After one week: 12%
One research study found that only 18% of users updated their proﬁle after 24 hours of
creating it, and only 12% updated after one week. Without live content that updates regularly,
proﬁles quickly become outdated representations.

186.
How are you
allowing people
to represent
themselves?
Allow people to personalize how they appear to others as this helps build their personal
identity.
Consider how the actions of someone’s connections are displayed relative to their own
proﬁle. Give people control over removing the actions and content of other people from their
proﬁle.
Allow people to control the audiences for different parts of their identity.
Consider how you might make people comfortable posting negative as well as positive
reviews.
Remind people about what their proﬁle looks like if they haven’t updated it in a while.

188.
Privacy is a process of boundary management. Itʼs about controlling how much other people
know about you.

189.
Public content is not the same as publicized content. People may be comfortable disclosing
information in one public setting, but not in a different public setting. If you give someoneʼs
information more exposure than they expect, you may be violating that personʼs sense of
privacy. Iʼm going to show you some examples of what that means shortly.

191.
I email my friends the
photos before I put them
on Facebook. They
decide which ones they
want to be tagged in.
Research on Facebook usage showed that only 8% of users had left their proﬁle open to
anyone searching on the Facebook network, and that 64% of users had adjusted their proﬁle
to “only friends.”

192.
44% take steps to limit the amount of
personal information available about
them online
71% change their privacy settings
47% delete unwanted comments on
their proﬁles
41% remove their name from photos
Young adults (ages 18–29) are more likely than older adults to say that they actively control
their privacy online.

193.
We think people care
less about privacy
because they
misunderstand
complicated privacy
settings.

194.
People
underestimate
the size of their
audience
Often this means publishing content that can be indexed by search engines, and surfaced in
search results.

195.
http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/tim166/293161965/
When we think about our behavior in public, it has always been bounded by where we are.
Only people within a certain distance can see what we do. Now, this isn't strictly true as other
people who were there can talk about my actions to others. And of course this happens a lot.
People gossip. But we can generally control what others know about us.

196.
Online things are different. We're missing all those social cues from the real world. So people
are posting content publicly, and they have no idea. I looked up this stuff on Facebook, I've
no idea who these people are.

198.
But he probably didnʼt think about the possibility of future employers ﬁnding this.

199.
It is our job, as
designers, to make sure
that people understand
what is happening.
This problem is about transparency. Our systems need to be absolutely transparent and it is
critical that we design this in. People need to understand the consequences of their actions,
and we, as designers, need to do our best to make these things clear.

201.
http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/mythoto/1234638761/
There is a second part to this problem. Letʼs imagine these girls were gossiping about this
guy. When he comes over, they stop. Their conversation isnʼt persistent. But if this gossip
happens on their Facebook walls, and it does, then it remains there for the guy to ﬁnd at any
point in time. Not only that, but it could be weeks old, or months, or even years.

202.
What does it mean for you - as a 25 year old - when someone can Google you and see that
you were a total bitch when you were 17 years old? The way that things are moving, youʼll
soon be able to ﬁnd any of this public content on search engines. All this content we're
creating is sticking around, attached to our identities. We need to help ﬁgure out how to
make good decisions about what they are posting.

204.
Privacy Trust
Privacy and trust go hand in hand. If people trust you, they'll do business with you. And on
the social web, people need to trust you with a lot of very personal, very sensitive data. How
you manage their privacy will often determine how much they are willing to trust you. So this
is important not just for maintaining people's sensitive information, but important for building
long term repeat business.